8 Steps To Becoming “The Best Sales Manager In The World”
You want to be the best in the world right?
To figure out how you and your product possibly could be, “the best in the world at” and become “more Walgreen than Eckerd”, lets go through a hypothetical analysis of your sales product or service line.
Lets say your sales reps sell a wide variety of software for businesses of all sizes (in complete and full disclosure, I have never sold software before so bear with me, however I have sold connectivity solutions). One particular kind of software package your salespeople sell is a Customer Relations Management software package. Even though your product is not the best in its class, its not the worst either.
This package (we’ll call it CRM 3.2) has certain query features that the competition does not have. Aside from a few of these features, your product is pretty much the same as the competitions. But you, as the ever observant sales manager notice a few things about CRM 3.2 and they are:
- The marketing pieces from corporate tout CRM 3.2 as “best in class” based upon some obscure study done back when this type of software was first being developed. According to the “Eckerd-like” marketing piece, it proudly brags that “CRM 3.2 is the ideal solution for businesses of all sizes across all product service groups who need a customer relations management software solution”.
- Although, you’ve never witnessed a sales prospect talk glowing in these terms about 3.2, but you have noticed that your sales team hasbeen selling an increased amount of this version alongside all the other packages they are commissioned to sell.
- Upon further observation, and through some in-depth analysis of your sales tracking reports, you notice that one particular version of that package has been that showing steady, yet unremarkable sales growth to consumer product-oriented, medium sized businesses with 10 to 40 employees.
- One of your reps, who recently has really started to close some steady business has sold more of this version than any other CRM and operating softwares in your group. Moreover, of all the software packages your reps sell, this package is about in the mid range for pricing and operating margin.
- In the sales calls you’ve attend with your best sales rep, you’ve noticed a consistent trend with some of the decision makers he meets with. You observe that they particularly like two features of CRM 3.2 that you know the competition does not have. They are an automatic report generator that tracks incoming query calls, then correlates that information with sales rep outgoing call activity for consumer product sales.
- The decision makers also really like the fact that the software can be uploaded in under ten minutes with a call to your customer service department so it can be loaded onto mobile devices such as Blackberries and iPhones. As a sales manager, you know that saving time on IT calls are essential to sales productivity. Further you know that this mobility feature is especially important to salespeople so that they have instant access to contacts and sales trends when in the field.
- Through your observation (and largely due to the recent success of your one sales representative), you get the sense that there is an opportunity here to attack the competition. And because you spend more time with that sales person than any other rep, you’re in touch with what trends you can exploit and preach to the rest of the sales team.
- You quickly peruse all the company marketing brochures and handouts again, and to your surprise, there is no mention of these two features embedded in CRM 3.2. This is typical you think, corporate has no idea what is really going on in your market anyway. And like most companies, they want you as the sales manger to sell to ALL markets, not one single market. This is classic big company thinking – dilute your sales team’s efforts by having your reps head in multiple directions at the same time (just like Eckerd). You as a top-performing sales manager and thinking more like Cork Walgreen than Eckerd, know that this strategy is a recipe for mediocrity.
- You know that you have twelve different products to sell across three very diverse markets. CRM 3.2 is just one of the twelve products. The markets include small businesses of 1-9 people, mid sized businesses of 10-50 employees and large businesses sized above 50 employees. You run reports on the mid-sized market to check for financial viability and market health. You then run a separate sales query on the mid-sized businesses that sell consumer products only. The queries reinforce your thinking: both markets are healthy and robust.
You come to the conclusion:
If you focused your sales reps energies on the mid-sized businesses that exclusively sell consumer-related products, there are plenty of sales prospects in your district to fill your pipeline. More importantly, you determine that if you only focused your sales representatives energies on that one market, then they would have more than enough sales prospects. Further, this would place them in excellent position to hit their year-end sales number. You’re starting to get excited.
You do a little more data-gathering:
- You next check with your customer service department and you ask them to run you a report on all the mid-sized customers who has purchased your CRM 3.2 product in the past six months. You first check their satisfaction scores. When you get the report, you see the “sat” scores are very impressive. Not only are customers in this category satisfied, but the number of customers in this bracket has increased dramatically over the course of the past few months, especially in your geographic sales market. This data further supports your hypothesis.
- You then talk to the controller in your branch and he confirms that in fact, if this mid-sized package were sold at X price, without a too steep of a discount, the overall unit corporate profit margin threshold would be upheld. Profit margin analysis is good.
- Lastly, ou then take a long, hard look at the sales representative compensation plan. After thorough investigation, you find out that as long as your sales reps sell X number of units at X profit margin, they will all be eligible for quota attainment. You also check your sales manager compensation plan to make sure that all this jives there as well. Fortunatley, it does. You conclude that if you reorganized your sales reps main selling efforts and focused on this particular business niche, both you and them would make plenty of commission dollars when successful. You start to get the feeling that all the stars are aligning.
You feel ready to roll out your plan to the sales team.
So let’s review what we have here. You have the following:
- A robust market, subdivided from an even larger market, which is ripe for product nicheing
- Two “game changing” features of your CRM 3.2 product that customers rave about
- Little if any competition for that particular feature in this sub-market space
- Healthy company approved profit margins for the product
- Quota-friendly compensation plan alignment for both sales rep and sales manager that allows for focus on niche targets markets and products
- High customer satisfaction ratings and overall excellent customer retention within new sales of this product in this sub-market space
- Good potential for referrals and recommendations from past satisfied customers
- And from the success of your one sales rep, excellent opportunity to increase employee morale due to recent successes
Bottom line: you’ve found your “Walgreen’s concept” – one that you can be “the best in the world at”.
We’ll show you how to sell it in our next post…
Post a comment below and tell us how you get your salespeople to sell so well that THEY are the best in the world.
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